Towards Understanding the Fundamentals of Mobility in Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new random waypoint mobility model for cellular networks, providing analytical tools to evaluate handover rate and sojourn time, crucial for understanding mobility impacts in emerging small-cell networks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel RWP mobility model on the entire plane and derives analytical expressions for handover rate and sojourn time in cellular networks.

Findings

The proposed RWP model better matches real mobility trajectories.

Handover rate is proportional to the square root of BS density.

Poisson-Voronoi model is as accurate as hexagonal for mobility evaluation.

Abstract

Despite the central role of mobility in wireless networks, analytical study on its impact on network performance is notoriously difficult. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing a random waypoint (RWP) mobility model defined on the entire plane and applying it to analyze two key cellular network parameters: handover rate and sojourn time. We first analyze the stochastic properties of the proposed model and compare it to two other models: the classical RWP mobility model and a synthetic truncated Levy walk model which is constructed from real mobility trajectories. The comparison shows that the proposed RWP mobility model is more appropriate for the mobility simulation in emerging cellular networks, which have ever-smaller cells. Then we apply the proposed model to cellular networks under both deterministic (hexagonal) and random (Poisson) base station (BS) models. We present analytic expressions for both handover rate and sojourn time, which have the expected property that the handover rate is proportional to the square root of BS density. Compared to an actual BS distribution, we find that the Poisson-Voronoi model is about as accurate in terms of mobility evaluation as hexagonal model, though being more pessimistic in that it predicts a higher handover rate and lower sojourn time.